Month: January 2011

There is a lot of information and resources on R. Much can be found online, through the R help mailing list, online tutorials (see e.g. Quick-R) and of course the R website. There are also numerous blogs. For a start you should check out R bloggers, which aggregates content of over 140 blogs about R.

For the beginner, but probably also for the slightly more advanced user, this post on R Why gives an interesting list with R books for undergraduates. Check it out.

I have a table with sample points from which I need to take subsets based on occurrence of these sample points in certain vegetation types. I have to repeat this many times for different combinations of vegetation types, so I have written a small script that gives me the conditions for sub-setting my table as a string, e.g.,

As Jeff Thurston writes in his blog, a strong case can be made for spatially enabling scientific research. This is especially true for biological / ecological research as biological processes occur across different scales. It certainly would make it that much easier to re-use or complement existing data. Not only would it facilitate collaboration amongst researchers, it would also help ‘end-users’ to find information that is relevant to them. Continue reading “Should you georeference your scientific data?”→

The main reason I started to use Linux was because at the time it was, and still is I think, much easier and more reliable to run GRASS GIS and other FOSS geospatial tools on Linux. An exception to that is SAGA GIS, which in my experience runs better on Windows (but admittedly I didn’t try out the latest release). People who are thinking about making the same step but are reluctant because of the perceived steep learning curve should consider giving the OSGeo LiveCD from the OSGeo LiveCD project a try Continue reading “Try out range of geospatial tools the easy way”→

I am creating a series of maps based on the Global forest resources assessment 2010 (FRA). A first example is the map below with the forest and woodland cover per country as percentage of the total land area. The pie charts show the proportion of the forest-woodland area covered by forest and the portion covered by woodland per country. There are obviously other, and possible better, ways to present this information, but I wanted to try out and demonstrate the use of chart overlay in QGIS. Continue reading “Mapping Forest resource assessment 2010 data – part II”→

The problem with copy data from e.g., an excel or calc sheet into an SQLite database (or any database I reckon) is that the data you copy might include an carriage return. I found this out the hard way after having copied data from a spreadsheet into a attribute table of a GRASS GIS vector layer (which is stored in a SQLite database). Continue reading “Finding and removing carriage returns in your SQLite table”→